DISHING UP BITE-SIZED SCIENCE

To mark registrations opening for The Big Bang Fair 2019 we brought science into the school canteen by creating 3D-printed school dinners.

The 3D-printed school meals were served up to students at St Helen’s Catholic Primary School in London. Each dish was themed around STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) objects and the innovative school dinners were created as a response to a new study that found almost three quarters (71%) of 11-16 year-olds think it’s crucial to have access to cutting edge technology in daily life.

We teamed up with Natural Machines which created Foodini – an intelligent 3D food printing kitchen appliance that enables you to print real ingredients into precise portions and shapes – to bring various STEM shaped dishes to life.

As we know, children don’t particularly like vegetables, so we focused mainly on the ingredients that kids wouldn’t normally enjoy and explored whether they would wolf them down if presented in the unusual 3D-printed form. And the results were brilliant: the kids ate cauliflower cogs, a hummus and guacamole lizard, space broccoli and a fibonacci spiral butternut squash, with many youngsters saying they liked the taste of the ingredients when 3D-printed.

Coverage wise, the story found a home in The Times print and online , Metro print and online, Mirror online, Yahoo, National Geographic Kids and The Week Junior – key titles for The Big Bang Fair to target their most important audience – kids!

We don’t imagine St Helen’s will be replacing their dinner staff with a 3D food printer just yet but it was great to see the kids so excited about the technology and of course, the media too.